


WHO THE HELL

by Not_So_Secretly_a_Spaceship, NotSoSecretlyAUnicorn



Category: Doctor Who (2005), The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Darwin the Magical Shapeshifting Beagle, Gen, Maggie/Magpie Greensea, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, SUDDENLY BOSOMS, Sorry Not Sorry, You Have Been Warned, fangasms, lady!Doctor, standard British lunacy, standard Kiwi lunacy, terrible blonde jokes to follow, this story is completely gratuitous
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 05:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3197684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_So_Secretly_a_Spaceship/pseuds/Not_So_Secretly_a_Spaceship, https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotSoSecretlyAUnicorn/pseuds/NotSoSecretlyAUnicorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Don’t be so glum, Magpie!” the Doctor called to her.  “You were a teenager when the movies came out, right?  Had one of those mad pubescent crushes on the bloke in the blond wig?"</p><p>“Yes and shut up,” said Maggie, fighting a smile and failing.</p><p>“Think about it this way then: if the worst happens, you might get to meet Legolas before we’re squished out of existence!”</p><p>Oh, excellent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also known as that time Unicorn lived with Spaceship for four months, had no escape from the enabling and between the pair of them they managed to concoct a fic where the Doctor is a Lady, the companion is found trapped in a Tolkien fan's wet dream and both are nearly eaten by trees. And that's only the first bit. 
> 
> MORE FANDOMS AND COMPANIONS TO COME.

**Episode One: There’s Something Here From Somewhere Else**

 

Maggie surveyed the yard, taking in the softly crooning hens pecking their way through their morning feed, the smoking rising in dreamy plumes from the surrounding cottages, the gold and green parabolas of the fields beyond where horses grazed, fat and content, and tried to dispel the nagging feeling of impending doom gathering in the pit of her stomach.

There was no call for it, really. The hill people were in retreat for once, there’d been no orc raids for the past three nights, she was even getting used to the whole we’re-bakers-and-we-rise-before-the-sun-yes-even-on-Sundays thing, and Roden still hadn’t worked up the courage to ask for her hand in marriage, so all in all, it was a good kind of day.

Maybe the lack of indoor plumbing was finally taking its toll. Long drop squat loos are a totally legitimate reason for burgeoning insanity and deepening paranoia.

Maggie suppressed a shiver.

And then she suppressed a scream as the hens swarmed squawking away from the house in an explosion of feathers and – Dear god.

A blonde head appeared from around the corner of the house. Catching sight of Maggie, the face split into a grin.

"Hello!" she said, rushing forwards and grabbing her hand. "I'm the Doctor!"

Maggie's arm was very nearly shaken out of its socket by this stranger – a girl in overlong pants, waist coat and ... bow tie?

"Pleasure to meet you!" she continued. "You wouldn't happen to have any spare shoes, would you? Only I shrank a bit and my shoes don't fit. Well, nothing really fits any more, but everything else is at least staying ON, so I really only need shoes, at least until I can get back to my…uh… house, and get some new things."

"What?” put in Maggie, brain still playing catch-up. “But you're wearing..."

"Um yes, new me, bit shorter than the old me, LOT different."

"But you're wearing-"

"Bowties are COOL, okay? Just not on this me, not quite right."

"BUT YOU'RE WEARING CLOTHES, ACTUAL, FOR REAL, CLOTHES."

"Well, yes, what else would I be wearing? A salad? That wouldn't protect my modesty very well, now, would it?"

“No,” Maggie said, very nearly crying now, one part frustration, one part relief (and possibly a dash of hysteria), “You don't get it; you're wearing MODERN clothes.”

The girl, who had been looking about the yard with interest and trying to get one of the more sedate hens off the toe of her over-large shoe, now turned to Maggie and said, “Hang on, whatcha mean 'modern'? Where are you from? When are you from?” She looked about again. “I mean this, this looks medievally...medievalish? Medievalite? What's the suffix on something like that? I used to just know all this stuff...”

“Oi!” said Maggie.

“RIGHT, SORRY, THING, HI!” The girl whipped around and grinned again. “Yes, I'm not from here, and you're not either – where're you from?”

“The real world,” Maggie said, “I was in the library and –”

“Sorry, _The_ Library?” Maggie frowned.

“The Auckland City Library.”

“So a time when Auckland still has a library...”

“What?”

“Nothing, look, what year is it? Usually I know these things but, uh, bit discombobulated, I guess.”

Maggie slowly shook her head – she didn't know, she'd been pulled in and didn't even know... “It's the year 3019.”

The girl – the Doctor, she'd said – blinked at her and then grinned, dimmer this time, disbelieving. “But it can't be, I’ve been there and it's nothing like this.”

Setting aside the impossible remark - “The year 3019 of the Third Age,” Maggie continued. “We're in a book. I was in the library reading and then got shoved into a book.”

The Doctor wasn't smiling now. “Which book?”

“JRR Tolkien, The Two Towers, just before the orc raids on Rohan get really bad, I think.”

From the west screams began splitting the morning air. First people, then horses.

“I think they just got bad,” muttered the Doctor. She grabbed Maggie's hand, “RUN!”

\---

They got as three houses down the road before Maggie ground to a halt.

The Doctor flapped. “No, no, no, come on, we need to run! Orcs have teeth right? I remember there being teeth, lots and lots of teeth, very effective special effects.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can, no losing hope now, there’s a girl.”

“No, I really can’t – asthma,” Maggie wheezed helplessly, bending nearly double at the waist as she tried to catch her breath. She looked up, staring at the buzzing…thing that was now pointed at her. “Um, don’t shoot?”

“Not a weapon,” said the Doctor, “sonic screwdriver, does lots of things.”

“Why is the light pink?”

The Doctor appeared to think about this, opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, made a face and then said, “Haven’t the foggiest. Although, could be because I’m a lady now.”

“What?”

“Less talk, more running! Bite down on this!”

Maggie yelped, or tried to, when an After Eight chocolate was shoved in her mouth. She bit down without thinking and then inhaled sharply – the mint was strong and cold and seemed to fill every corner of her mouth…and then blast through her airways like an ice storm. She drew in deep lungfuls of minty air…

“I can breathe!”

“Which means you can run!”

Behind them, the screaming was getting closer, mingled with the roars and snarls of orcs, the battle cries of the Hill People.

“We’re going to need horses if we’re going to outrun them,” Maggie gasped.

“Stables?”

“This way!”

They veered along a lane towards the north-east of the village, dodging men and horses, women with children in their arms and the occasional displaced chook.

“There’s a communal stable in this village,” Maggie said, “the bakery drays are there.”

The stable was a flurry of activity. People were saddling horses and packing saddle bags, preparing to flee to the surrounding villages with food, water and the clothes on their backs. Maggie’s boss, Carrigan was there, rolling loaves of bread in cloth and handing them out to people.

“Maggie!” she shouted, snatching the girl up and pressing her to her floury bosom. There was a lot of it. “You’re alive, girl! Good! Now help me load up the drays and we’ll scarper.”

“Right,” Maggie said once she’d surfaced from the cleavage. “Carrigan? This is the Doctor. She’s new, like I was. And she’s coming with us.”

“Works for me, lovey,” boomed Carrigan. “You’re wee things – Darwin can take you both.”

Darwin stuck his dapple grey head over his half door and put his black nose against Maggie’s shoulder.

“Good boy,” Maggie whispered, kissing his dear face and then beginning to put his tack on. She’d barely gotten the saddlebags buckled when there was a roar from just behind the feed room and the sound of splintering timber.

“Go!” howled Carrigan, already astride a snorting Barrow.

Maggie shined up onto Darwin’s broad back and the Doctor bounded up behind her.

“Onwards!” she crowed, “To glory and…uh…hmmm. Pavlova, maybe?”

“I hate pavlova,” Maggie said, putting her heels to Darwin, who did not need telling twice, and sending them hurtling down the stable aisle and out into the sunlight.

“Where are we going?” the Doctor called over the wind and the thunder of dinner-plate hooves.

“The next village over,” Maggie called back, “They’ve got more fighting men and better fortifications. The outriders will have alerted them by now.”

Overhead, there was a rasping whistle and a flaming arrow sank into the earth two metres to their right.

“That’s not good,” the Doctor said.

There was a flurry of orange, the rasp of flying projectiles and the sky was filled with flaming arrows.

“And that’s worse,” she continued.

The arrows began to rain down around them – Maggie heard screaming as some of them found their mark, bringing down horses and riders. Behind them, distant now, she could hear the bonfire roar of houses going up in smoke.

She thought of the bakery that had been her home for the past three months – of the clothes mended and donated by grandmothers and aunts, the apron that had once been Carrigan’s son before he was killed in a raid like this one, the wooden trinket box Roden had blushingly presented to her when he found out it was her birthday, the first pair of shoes that had been made just for her, and the cantankerous ovens in the bakery proper, the smell of yeast and home-milled flour, of honey and hot stone and fresh bread…the sun rising over the hills, seen from the bakery doorway, and the moon and stars glowing through her bedroom window.

There had been raids before, but somehow this was worse.

This time she knew she would not be going back.

They pounded onwards, but three miles from the burning village Darwin missed a step, drums falling out of time, staggered violently for a few steps nearly threw both Maggie and the Doctor forward against his shoulders.

“Whoa!” Maggie gasped. “Oh, Darwin, no!”

The Doctor scrabbled down and aimed the screwdriver at each of the dray’s legs. “Lame in the rear left.” Several dials were twiddled and buttons pressed, and all the while the snarls and howls of orcs pressed closer. She aimed the screwdriver at the dragging leg and the buzzing went from lone bumblebee to hive of enraged hornets.

Maggie yelped as Darwin’s head came up abruptly and he snorted, prancing on the spot, which is rather alarming in a horse weighing nearly a metric ton.

“Off we pop!” the Doctor said, wriggling back up behind Maggie.

“What did you do?”

“Fixed it! Bit weird, never fixed a horse before. Still, first time for everything!”

Maggie gave Darwin his head and they were gone, only…

“What did you do! Why aren’t we galloping?” Maggie demanded of her fellow passenger, as Darwin glided apace across the green plains and hills of Rohan.

“We are galloping, I think,” the Doctor said, “we just aren’t bouncing – I told you, I’ve never fixed a horse before!”

Maggie looked down at Darwin’s legs churning away beneath them, like a swan paddling at the water while sailing calmly along on the surface, and decided a lack of bouncing was the least of their problems.

\---

The next village over was in uproar; ‘fighting men’ apparently meant enraged and/or panicking farmers and tradesmen since the Rohirrim where decidedly not here and hadn’t been heard of or seen in the area for months.

Whoo-hoo.

Maggie and the Doctor found a courtyard behind the fortifications, unsaddled Darwin and gave him a quick rub down. There was water in a trough and a boy popped out of the stable to offer them an armful of hay and a small canvas bag of grain feed – “All we’ve got to spare, miss.”

“It’ll do for now,” Maggie murmured, stroking Darwin’s neck as he munched noisily.

“Right, so, first things first,” the Doctor announced, clapping her hands together and grinning. “Maggie, how on earth did you get here?”

Maggie settled herself on a barrel and frowned. “Same way you did, I got shoved into a book.”

“Mmmmmmmmmmm-yes, but how? What did it? What can you remember?”

“I was in downtown to pick up a parcel – my post-box is there – and I went to the library café afterwards for lunch. Someone was playing music really loudly, so I went up to the second floor, where they have the study desks, to read for a bit. I found this desk, all by itself behind the shelves. I – I thought it was a little weird, y’know, since all the other desks are those particle board ones with the plastic covering, but this one was wood – real wood, polished – and had draws. The book was open on it. I just sat down and started reading. Everything was fine, for a while and then…”

“Yes?”

“And then my phone went off. Just an email from work; I’d only gotten it because I was still on the library Wi-Fi…but I heard something…”

Maggie paused, knotting her fingers in her skirt. This bit always gave her the creeps, when she thought back on it. For a while she’d dismissed it as just too crazy – _said the girl trapped in a Tolkien fan’s wet dream_ – but the more the thought about it, ran the memory over again in her mind, the more it made sense.

“Only I didn’t hear it, exactly. I think – I think it was in my head. Not that I imagined it but –”

“But you heard it with your mind, not your ears,” the Doctor said.

Maggie nodded. “Yeah.”

“What was it? What did you hear?”

“A voice, a – a thunderous shout. ‘Silence!’ And then I felt the floor go out from under my feet and I was here. I fell out of one of the bakery ovens. Nearly gave Carrigan a heart attack.”

The Doctor was quiet for a moment, frowning down at her shoes. Men’s shoes, Maggie noticed, size eleven at least. They were only staying on because she’d laced them around her ankles too. The Doctor herself wasn’t much taller than Maggie, five-five maybe, with pale skin and dusty blonde hair cropped in a messy halo around her head. She had the kind of eyes Maggie’s mother would have called moonlight eyes – pale blue, to match the rest of her, but restless as searchlights, watching her fine-fingered piano-player hands turn the sonic screwdriver over and over, over and over…

“THAT’S IT!”

Maggie nearly went backwards over the barrel. Darwin flicked one tapered grey ear in toward the explosion but continued chewing without pause.

“What’s it?” Maggie gasped, clutching her pounding heart.

“OH, THAT IS BRILLIANT!” the Doctor continued, “Ooh, that beastly, BEASTLY, beautiful thing! It’s put us in a pocket dimension!”

“A what?”

“A pocket dimension! It’s a wee bubble with a wee world inside – physically, it’d be small, could be any kind of container, some are so small you can put them in your pocket.”

“Hence the name, I’m guessing… But what about…” Maggie flung her arms out, encompassing their surrounded with the span of her arms – the courtyard, the village, the smell of smoke and hay and people and life and despair. The world. Tolkien’s world. “…what about all this?”

“Ah! Ah-ha-ha-ha! It’s perfect, perfect is what it is, because pocket dimensions draw their content from prewritten instructions, directives that build the world.”

“Like software? A computer programme?”

“Not even that complex! Any written content, like say… a _literary work_.”

Maggie threw her hands up. “Of course. It’s drawing from _The Lord of the Rings_. And I fell into it on the page I was reading.”

“Precisely! Only, not into the central event line,” she said, tapping her lower lip with the screwdriver, which made Maggie unaccountably nervous. What if it went off? “The world has a prewritten set of events that Tolkien covered, so the rest would be generated based on provided data and used as a habitat for entering lifeforms – can’t have people going ‘round interacting with the canonical timeline, book’ll go wonky.”

Maggie suddenly flashed back on some of the frankly terrifying fanfiction she had read as a teenager. Tenth walker indeed.

“Wonky?”

“Implode,” the Doctor said absently.

“Oh,” Maggie said, white-knuckling the edge of the barrel and blinking her way through a dizzy spell. “Gosh. So… so how do we get out without…imploding?”

“Easy-peasy pudding and pie!” the Doctor said cheerfully. “Wanna see my spaceship?”

Maggie’s eyebrows went in search of her hairline. “Isn’t that the pick-up line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”

The Doctor gaped at her. “Noooooo,” she said, disbelieving, “Someone actually wrote a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy?” She stamped one ill-shod foot. “That would have been so _useful_ three days ago!”

“…I think you and I are talking about different things.” There was a thoughtful pause. “Wait, you have a spaceship?”

“Yeah,” the Doctor said, “It’s blue. And a box. And…and…” she frowned. “And in a forest, now that I think of it.”

Dread coiled in the pit of Maggie’s stomach. “Which forest?”

The Doctor grinned. “The one with the walking trees.”

\---

“Fangorn,” Maggie said later, back in Darwin’s saddle as he carefully picked his way through the tangle of tree roots that made up the forest floor. “How could you possibly have gotten the idea that FANGORN was a great place to park a spaceship?”

“To be fair,” The Doctor said, sounding ever-so-slightly put out from behind Maggie’s left shoulder, “I was regenerating at the time which is not conducive to accurate driving, so really, I didn’t park here at all – I crash-landed.”

“Alright, I’ll let you off this one time.”

“Kind of you.”

“On the condition you don’t get me devoured by man-eating trees. Also, regenerating?”

“I’m a Time Lord, it’s a thing.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. All that chatting and now she was clamming up. “Like it’s a thing with skinks? Or starfish? A bit comes off and then grows back?” She looked over her shoulder and was met with a variety of elastic facial expressions before the Doctor settled on thoughtful and a little sheepish.

“Well, yeah, a bit. Sort of. Sometimes. I mean, if I regenerate and then something comes off within the first fifteen hours or so it’ll grow back.”

Maggie noted that the regenerating and the growing bits back were not entirely the same thing, but caught the rather shifty look on the Doctor’s face and decided to leave it for a bit.

“So, your ship, with you in it, must have gotten dragged into the book…”

“Ah, yeah…I think we landed on it. From the sounds of it whatever threw us all in doesn’t like noise and the TARDIS isn’t exactly modest when she announces herself.”

“TARDIS?”

“Time and Relative Dimension in Space!” was the answer, accompanied by enthused arm flailing. “It goes places, all the places, all the time!”

Maggie grinned; the enthusiasm was contagious, even the oppressive air of the wood couldn’t dampen it.

“So does this magic box have a name?”

The arm flailing collapsed and the grin turned sheepish, the pale face pink. “Um.”

Maggie smirked. “Not for public consumption then?”

“I sort of…chose it…when I was…”

“Drunk?”

“Uh, ecstatic and flying her. Which is about the same thing, really.”

From somewhere to their left there was a dry crack, like timber warming suddenly after prolonged cold, at a volume equal to a cannon going off at close range. Darwin’s head came up and he paused with one huge hoof raised, though thankfully showed no signs of bolting. Maggie flinched and the Doctor raised one fine blonde eyebrow.

“Bit not good,” she said.

“Huorn,” Maggie breathed, hands tightening on the reins and shifting in the saddle. Darwin swung his head around and touched her knee with his nose.

“Huorn,” the Doctor agreed. “They know we’re here, and they’re waking up.”

“Shit fuck,” Maggie said. “Can you do anything about it? With the sonic thingy?”

“Sonic screwdriver, and no – doesn’t work so well with wood.”

Maggie could feel herself coiling up, knees gripping Darwin’s sides, clutching the reins with one hand and a fistful of mane with the other. The Doctor’s arm tightened around her waist.

There was another crack to their right, and a rumble reminiscent of the bass calls of elephants and blue whales – deep and rolling and otherworldly, distorting and reverberating through the trees.

“Not yet,” the Doctor breathed.

CRACK to the right again, closer, sharper.

“Not quite…”

A rumble behind them and a series of rippling notes, higher and quicker, and then echoed somewhere to the left.

“They’re talking to each other,” Maggie whispered shakily.

“Not yet,” the Doctor said urgently, and Maggie could hear the click and whir of the screwdriver working up to something. “Not yet, not yet…”

Cracking and rumbling and calling, closer and closer and closer, left and right and behind, closing in around them like a pincer.

“Not yet!” the Doctor hissed.

“Oh god!” Maggie whisper-screamed.

And then silence fell. The Doctor aimed the sonic screwdriver behind her and howled, “NOW!”

The surrounding trees shook with the force of the explosion and Darwin launched himself forward like he’d been shot out of a cannon. Behind them a belling roar was expelled by the collective huorn and rose like a battle cry in their thundering wake.

Darwin wove through the forest with startling agility for a horse of his size. He turned on a penny and darted like a swift; Maggie and the Doctor clung to him for dear life and Maggie was frankly amazed they managed to stay on. Behind them it sounded like half the forest was uprooting itself and its neighbours to try and get at them.

Maggie was really over being chased today.

“Where are we supposed to be going?” she shouted over her shoulder.

The screwdriver, buzzing like an enraged wasp appeared around her side, aimed over Darwin’s shoulder.

“As long as it’s buzzing we’re going the right way!”

As though taking cues from Murphy’s Law, the buzzing dropped off and the wee pink light on the screwdriver’s end dimmed from exuberant neon fuchsia to a sad shade of spoiled grapefruit.

“Fuck.”

Darwin chose this moment to snort as though in derision and make a terrifyingly nippy turn to the east, cornering like he was on rails and shooting through a clearing. The rush of clear air and unfiltered sunlight was like an intravenous injection of optimism and Maggie found herself sitting forward in the saddle and grinning. Behind her, the Doctor whooped.

“I really hope we don’t die!” Maggie said giddily.

“Words to live by!” the Doctor crowed back.

They shot back under the eaves of the woods, world again reduced to dappled shadows and stale air, but too buoyed to care. The screwdriver whirred at an increasingly higher pitch and cast rose-tinted strobes over the sides of the trees. Darwin swerved left, swerved right, very nearly slid down a sudden slope littered with mud and leaves and broken branches –

“There!” cried the Doctor.

And there it was, a blue box with a little light on top, winking in cycles like a miniature lighthouse, calling them home. It lay amidst a tangle of broken tree limbs and splinters, well and truly crashed, listing slightly to the left and rather grubby into the bargain. Alarmingly, Maggie noted, they were still going at full tilt and Darwin, packed full of adrenaline and nerves by now, showed no sign of stopping. Crap.

“Doctor!”

The Doctor reached over her shoulder and snapped her fingers. It was like a sudden shout in a quiet room. The doors of the TARDIS swung open, Maggie yelped and plastered herself flat to Darwin’s neck and felt the Doctor flattened against her back as they charged through the door into darkness. Darwin snorted and stamped and ground to a halt. Maggie heard the doors clap shut behind them and the thuds of the huorn belting them in thwarted rage.

The Doctor slid to the floor saying, “hang on, hang on, just let me…”

And then the lights came back on.

Oh.

Oh wow.

The room was huge, round, and for a moment Maggie thought the forest had found its way in with them: six branching support beams appeared to have grown from the creamy floor tiles and reached all the way to the very distant ceiling, which was hung with looping, trailing cables, some of them very fine and tangling together in streamers of gently glowing pink and white and gold. Maggie thought there must be something organic up there too, because there were big blooming things up there that looked like lotuses. The bowed walls were covered in a cream, green and blue mosaic of repeating seven pointed stars and small diamonds, studded a regular intervals with metallic lozenges of bronze, each about the size and shape of a hubcap. There were also several enormous terracotta pots scattered about the floor, against the walls and under the raised central platform which contained a young Morten Bay Fig, several cherry blossom trees, at least two apple trees and what Maggie thought might be a herb garden, going from the smell.

In the middle… in the middle, atop the platform was what was evidentially the central console – Darwin took a few cautious steps closer, sniffing the handrail, which looked like it had been filched from one of those Art Nouveau metro stations in Paris, and Maggie could see it in all its apparently cobbled together glory. There was a typewriter circa 1929, and an astrolabe in brass and several jewel-toned buttons on stalks, waving like poppies in a breeze, as well as more levers and knobs and blinky lights than you could poke a stick at. Rising from the centre was a columns of something that looked like glass but was probably far more alien and much less likely to crack; it was spiralled like a narwhal’s horn inside and out and two glowing white spheres could be seen circling in opposite directions inside it, one going up, the other down, the glow brightest when they crossed paths in the middle.

“It’s…” she said faintly.

The Doctor grinned, leaning against the console, perfectly at home. “I love this bit,” Maggie heard her say.

“It’s beautiful,” Maggie finished.

The Doctor blinked. “That’s new.”

“And…bigger on the inside.”

The grin came back full force. “That’s not. How do you like it, Maggie?”

Maggie slid from Darwin’s back, still gazing around her in amazement. “Magpie.”

“Eh?”

“Magpie – it’s what everyone calls me…when I’m distracted…by shiny things.” She made a fervent face at the Doctor. “ _It is so shiny in here_.”

That got a delighted giggle. “Well then, Magpie, welcome to the TARDIS. How do you like her?”

“She’s a dream.” Maggie’s smile was incandescent. “God, I hope I never wake up.”

The Doctor said –

_Ding._

“Well, that’s broken the moment,” she muttered.

“What was that?” asked Maggie, looking around.

“It’s a machine that goes _ding_ ,” said the Doctor, bounding down under the floor of the console and digging around.

There was some crashing that sounded expensive and possibly kitchen related. Maggie cringed.

“If I remember correctly it also microwaves dinners from a distance of twenty feet and downloads comics from the future.”

Her mad blonde head briefly popped up above floor level.

“I was going through a phase,” she said, and then disappeared again.

“Uh, right,” said Maggie. “Phase. Okay. ”

The Doctor shouted, “AHA!” and bodily emerged from under the console holding something that looked like the offspring of a steampunk cosplay prop and an Eighties Transformers action figure. “Got the bugger!”

“Great!” said Maggie. “What’s the ding for, though?”

“Oh, it does that when it detects…shapeshifter…DNA…”

She blinked at Maggie. Her eyes narrowed. Suddenly the rotating brass head of the ding-machine was jammed up under Maggie’s nose.

“Um, hi,” said Maggie, a little nasal.

There was an awkward pause.

Abruptly the _ding_ -machine was withdrawn and shaken vigorously.

“That’s weird,” said the Doctor.

“Ya think,” Maggie sassed.

“Mmm, oh, sorry, had to make sure you weren’t a shapeshifting alien bent on killing me. Or kissing me. No, really, that happened,” she added at Maggie’s alarmed look.

“Okay,” she said, apprehensive. “So it I’m not the shapeshifter, and you’re not…you’re not, are you? A shapeshifter?”

“What? No!”

“Well if it’s not me and it’s not you –” _DING_.

“Woof!”

Both of them turned, slowly, towards where Maggie had left Darwin.

“That’s not a horse,” said the Doctor.

It was, in fact, a beagle.

 

\---

(BUM-BUM-BUM-BADUMBAM-BADUMBUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BADUM!) TO BE CONTINUED

ROLL END CREDITS WITH NEWLY THEMED SIGNATURE MUSIC (OOOH-WE-OOOO-OOOOWEOOO-OOOOWEOO-WEEEO-WHOOO-WEOOOOOOOOOOOOO)


	2. Where Fangirls Fear to Tread

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t be so glum, Magpie!” the Doctor called to her. “You were a teenager when the movies came out, right? Had one of those mad pubescent crushes on the bloke in the blond wig? 
> 
> “Yes and shut up,” said Maggie, fighting a smile and failing.
> 
> “Think about it this way then: if the worst happens, you might get to meet Legolas before we’re squished out of existence!”

PREVIOUSLY:

_“Okay,” she said, apprehensive. “So it I’m not the shapeshifter, and you’re not…you’re not, are you? A shapeshifter?”_

_“What? No!”_

_“Well if it’s not me and it’s not you –”_

_“Woof!”_

_Both of them turned, slowly, towards where Maggie had left Darwin._

_“That’s not a horse,” said the Doctor._

_It was, in fact, a beagle._

 

 

** Episode Two: Where Fangirls Fear to Tread **

 

NOW:

The Doctor and Maggie stared at the beagle.

The beagle stared back.

The Doctor turned to Maggie and said, “You let a shapeshifter onto my spaceship.”

Maggie opened her mouth to commence conversational combat when there was an almighty BOOM and the TARDIS rocked to the left.

The beagle skittered on the floor tiles and let out a great _bawooo_ of alarm.

“Huorn!” Maggie gasped, wobbling over to the jump seat.

“Huorn,” the Doctor agreed. “Time to go.” She strode to the console and began turning various dials, tapping what might have been nuclear launch codes into the typewriter for all Maggie knew, and pointed a long pale finger at the dog. “I’ll deal with you after we’ve got free of the carnivorous flora. Hang on to something, Magpie!”

 

 

From the murky depths of Fangorn then came a bilious groan and then the snapping of many branches. Greenery exploded into the air above the ancient wood, to a height of thirty feet. There was a whistle similar to that of a loosed firework making its way skyward, but instead of pyrotechnics preceding the sound, there came a rather larger projectile, taller than a man and about the width of a large door. The colour could just be made out to be a deep blue, perhaps slightly weather-beaten, but it was travelling at quite a rate. There was a small blinking light on the top, and at one point a section of the object flapped open and the howl of a hound joined the whistling. For a moment, a figure was perceived at this small door.

One could not be sure…but there might have been a cry of, _“wheeeeeeeeeee…!”_ upon the breeze.

Gandalf drew a snorting Shadowfax to an abrupt halt and the pair of them stared at the ascending blue box.

Shadowfax gave it a baleful glare and huffed several uncomplimentary things in horse-speech.

Gandalf narrowed his eyes, piercing the box with his gaze as far as he was able.

“Ah,” he said, contemplative, “no, my dear boy, I think not. Nothing to do with Saruman at all.”

He chuckled.

“Not even Sauron himself could cope with that one.”

 

 

The Doctor threw a few levers and thumped a fist into the keys of the typewriter and the TARDIS rumbled and grumbled and slowed to a more reasonable and less hair-raising pace.

“Right!” she said. “So!”

Darwin wagged his tail against Maggie’s leg. “Woof,” he said cheerfully.

The Doctor’s eyebrows went up. “Really?”

“What?” said Maggie.

The Doctor said, “Oh, I speak Dog.”

Maggie said flatly, “What.”

“Weeeeell, I mostly speak Dog. I mean, I speak _basic_ Dog, but I haven’t quite got around to all the dialects.” She looked briefly embarrassed, as though she were confessing to being caught out using Wikipedia as an essay reference instead of her apparent ability chat with domestic canids. “And I’ve been reliably informed I have the most _shocking_ Corgi accent,” she confided.

“Woof,” said Darwin.

The Doctor dimpled, “Oh you’re too kind.”

“Woof,” continued Darwin, “woof, woof!”

“Well why didn’t you say so _before_?” the Doctor said, throwing her arms up.

“Sorry, what?” Maggie asked, again, beginning to feel a little beleaguered. “Er, translation?”

“Oh,” said the Doctor, “sorry, yes, well… It looks like Darwin here – he quite likes the name by the way, so good on you – got sucked into this book some time around the –” she paused to clarify with him, there was much yipping and a drawn out _‘reeeeeeeeally’_ from the Doctor, “– the first War of the Ring – gosh, so quite a while then – and has lived here in Middle Earth ever since. In real time. This is a pseudo-dog who’s been around the block,” she concluded.

“Woof.”

“Several times, yes.”

Maggie looked from the Doctor to Darwin and back to the Doctor again, apprehensive.

Both looked brightly back at her.

“I genuinely cannot tell if you’re having me on,” she said slowly, “so I’m pretty much going to take your word for it.”

“Works for me!” the Doctor said, and bounded back up to the console. Darwin bounded after her and stood on the platform gazing adoringly at Maggie until she followed. “Now we just have to figure out how to get the fuck out of this gorgeous little pocket dimension.”

Maggie nodded, a little weary. “Great place to visit, but not to live in. Again.”

“That bad?” the Doctor asked, peering around the glowing console pillar.

“If you have a flushing toilet and running hot water I may cry.”

“I have multiple bathrooms.”

“ _Oh_ my god,” said Maggie thinly, rolling her eyes upwards to preserve water tension and fanning her face.

The Doctor looked sympathetic but a little alarmed and went back to examining screens and read-outs and tapping at the typewriter.

“Okay…” she said, “ooookay, I think we may have something resembling the beginnings of an idea for a solution.”

“…right.”

The Doctor looked up, face the very picture of seriousness.

“I think,” she said solemnly, “that we need this bastard to sneeze.”

 

 

“Okay, run this by me again,” Maggie said later, as they whistled over the landscape and the Doctor hung halfway out one of the open doors peering about, face half covered by a pair of very embellished sunglasses that apparently could be tuned (who the fuck _tunes sunglasses_?) to spot ‘crucial narrative consistencies’.

Maggie was clinging to the jump seat, silently praying they wouldn’t fall out of the sky and die horribly as a red and blue smear on the Middle-Earthian landscape.

“Why?” the Doctor shouted over the wind.

“Because my brain is still having those pesky urges towards self-preservation,” Maggie sassed back.

“You remember I talked about the whole avoiding canon events because if those were mucked about with then the whole thing would –”

“Implode,” finished Maggie, who looked a little white around the eyes. “Yeah.”

“Right then! Well the idea here is that we find an event and threaten to faff about with it. Just enough to worry whoever sucked us in into throwing us out again. After all, if this dimension collapses, that’s the end of having a convenient place to put noisy so-and-so’s like us – pocket dimensions are hard-biscuit to build and absolutely _pants_ to recreate or resurrect once they’ve collapsed.”

“So we’re relying on the unknown malefactor being pants at hitting a theoretical re-do button? Because I’d like to point out that just because all the people and creatures you know about have a hard time building new wee dimensions and things, we don’t who or what this is, and it could be… amazeballs at this crap.”

“Uh, yes.”

“Awesome. You know what they say about assuming right?”

The Doctor offered her a huge, shiny and utterly terrifying grin. “Yes!”

“…okay then. So no alternative plans? Maybe? (Please?).”

“This one has the least possibility of dying!” the Doctor shouted, face back into the wind.

“How is this our life?” Maggie asked Darwin.

Darwin made sad, sad beagle eyes at her and put his chin on her knee.

“Don’t be so glum, Magpie!” the Doctor called to her. “You were a teenager when the movies came out, right? Had one of those mad pubescent crushes on the bloke in the blond wig?

“Yes and shut up,” said Maggie, fighting a smile and failing.

“Think about it this way then: if the worst happens, you might get to meet Legolas before we’re squished out of existence!”

Oh, excellent.

 

 

The Doctor brought them down…somewhere. It was grassy and hilly and boulder-strewn and actually did look an awful lot like all the grassy, hilly, boulder-strewn bits of Otago, so well done you, Mr Jackson.

They spend the night – Maggie had actually had a bit of a weep into the actual pillow of her actual bed after having an actual wash in an actual hot shower (and this had nothing to do with never seeing the village or the bakery or Carrigan or Roden or the Rohirric hills and plains ever again, shut up) – and in the very early morning set up for Operation Sneeze.

“That is a terrible name for it.”

“It’s very on point.”

Maggie sighed.

“Okey-dokey, now, this is the bit where those three are going after the really big orc-things –”

“Uruk-hai.”

“Yeah, that lot. That in the movie they were –”

“Taking the hobbits to Isengard,” Maggie said innocently.

“Yes!”

Maggie frowned at her. “You keep referring to the movies, didn’t you read the books?”

“Well. Yes.” The Doctor looked a bit nettled. “But that was three faces ago and my upstairs brain is still a little scrambled.”

“Should you be operating heavy machinery?” Maggie asked, gesturing to the TARDIS, which was currently hidden under Darwin’s bulk. He was crouched over it in the form of a great big chameleon thing with three eyes and one of those phosphorescent headlamps seen on angler fish, only Darwin’s was about the size of Maggie’s head and currently shuttered, since he had coloured himself to look like the surrounded stones.

“Looks a bit fishy,” Maggie had said to him, and Darwin had bared his multi-layered jaws at her in one of the most terrifying smiles she’d ever since, including that one time she’d watched _The Return of the King_ extended edition and witnessed the Mouth of Sauron.

“Pfft,” said the Doctor, “I’ve flown her worse off.”

“Not comforting,” Maggie muttered as they got into position. “…just your upstairs brain is scrambled?”

“Well, I won’t say the downstairs one isn’t getting a few overhauls.”

“I’m going to regret asking, but ‘overhauls’?”

“Currently I’m overhauling my opinions of men in leather trousers,” the Doctor remarked drily, as she peered over the small rise they had hidden behind and took in the figure standing with his back to them and his face to the rising sun.

“Didn’t do anything for you before?”

“Always sort of made me wish I was the one wearing the leather pants. Now I just want to get into them.”

“Good heavens,” said Maggie. “I think we’re going to be really good friends, you and me.”

They grinned at each other, and hunkered down further out of sight.

“Ready?” the Doctor asked.

“Crickey, I hope so,” muttered Maggie.

 

 

Legolas rose before the others, greeting the day with a small song. He began scanning their surrounding immediately, wondering if he might catch a glimpse of the Eagle he had spotted the day before.

Behind him, came a small sound.

If he had to guess, he would say it was the exhale of a young mortal woman in her middle to late twenties, and had a ring of anticipation to it, as though bracing herself for –

He swung about, knocking an arrow to his bow and drawing it as he did, to come face to face with –

A young woman in her middle twenties, with brown hair, freckles and uncertain hazel eyes. He frowned – how had she gotten to so close to them without him hearing her approach? What was she doing out here alone? – and was about to ask her business when she grinned at him, _blew a kiss_ of all things…and vanished.

Into thin air.

He stood gawping like a backwoods mortal for a good minute before he heard Gimli roll over in his sleep and Aragorn begin to stir. He unnocked his arrow, slung his bow back over his shoulder, cleared his throat and said nothing of the matter.

But he did not forget.

 

 

In a secluded corner of Auckland City Library, there was a magnificent crash as two shelves were knocked over, one to the left, another to the right, and a blue police box stood proud and unconcerned upon the wreckage of a small wooden desk, an anxious beagle crouched upon its roof beside its winking lantern.

Seconds later a young lady in a man’s suit was flung down in front of it, and then another two meters in front of her.

“Gosh,” said the Doctor, climbing to her feet.

“Ow,” said Maggie, also getting to hers.

“WHAT IN GOD’S NAME?” shouted an approaching librarian in a knit cardy and shit-kicker boots.

“Uh, time to go, I think,” said the Doctor, grabbing Maggie and hauling her into the TARDIS. There was a yelp as Darwin bounded down from the roof, and followed them. When Maggie looked around it was to see a large parti-coloured cat with fringed ears instead of his beagle shape. He also had what looked to be her handbag hanging from his jaws. She took it from him and rubbed his bearded chin, cooing her thanks. He purred at her like a small locomotive.

The door, meanwhile had slammed on the librarian’s stunned face and the great machine began to make a series of whispering screeches, the balls of light barrelling up and down the spiral at the centre of the consol. The Doctor was flipping levers, jabbing several of the poppy-stalk buttons and then hauling on a Spitfire yoke that popped out.

“Where to?” she yelled over the humming and honking and growling and shrieking of the engines.

“What?”

“Pretend I’m a taxi,” the Doctor said, “where to, miss?”

“Uh, 56 Milton Road, Mount Eden,” Maggie said, absurdly wondering if she had the correct change.

“Onwards,” cried the Doctor, grinning, “to glory and pav-”

“No,” said Maggie.

 

 

Maggie stood in her own living room, a little overcome.

“This is my house,” she said again.

“Yes,” agreed the Doctor, still distracted with her flatmate’s two Siamese fighting fish, who were for once not making angry, thwarted bubbles at each other through the divide in their tank, and were now making angry thwarted bubbles at Darwin, who was in the form of some kind of legged-fish-thing. Maggie vaguely hoped he wasn’t going to drip on the carpet.

Maggie did another slow circle, carefully touching the mismatched furniture, the odd ornaments that littered the sideboard and TV cabinet, gazed at the Fiona Pardington print (Maggie’s, not Mintie’s) and framed Spice Girls concert poster (Mintie’s, not Maggie’s), the communal calendar visible in the hallway – hang on a tick.

“Doctor.”

“Mmm?”

“I was in that book for months.”

“Ye-es…”

“But the calendar says it’s still Tuesday.”

The Doctor blinked. “Well, you were in Middle-Earth for months, but no time passed here. You – we – exited at the same door we entered.”

“So…” Maggie digested this for a moment. “Narnian rules then?”

The Doctor grinned. “Yarp.”

“Awesome.” Maggie sat down in the least ugly of their squashy armchairs. “Only not quite because I left my favourite jeans in that bloody book.”

“Welp,” said the Doctor, vaulting onto the couch, shirt tails flapping, “we could go and get you another pair!” Then she looked sly. “From say…the original Levi Strauss & Co store, San Fran, circa ooooh, 1962 maybe?”

Maggie narrowed her eyes at her. “What are you saying?”

“Well, she’s a time machine!” the Doctor said, gesturing at the TARDIS.

“No, I got that, but what are you actually saying here?” asked Maggie, leaning forward.

The Doctor fidgeted, then occupied her fingers with combing through the ruff Darwin was now sporting, in the form of a miniaturized purple lion-like creature.

“Look, I’m…a time traveller, yes? And a wanderer, and I like adventures and things, but…” She shrugged give Maggie a helpless sort of look.

Maggie examined her face, the anxious distance in the moonlight eyes, her sudden grip on Darwin’s shoulder, the yearning in the lean of her body.

“But you don’t want to do it alone.”

“No, well, I mean –” a short, humourless laugh, “my brain’s unjumbling, you know, and it’s telling me in no uncertain terms that…I’m crap at doing it alone.”

Maggie found herself smiling. “You need a handbrake.”

“Yes!” the Doctor enthused, breaking back into manic energy, grinning, “Yes that, please, one of those! A, um, a friend-shaped one, though?”

Maggie sat back in her chair, looked at her again. What to do?

“You’d like me to go on adventures with you?”

“Yes, please.”

“Go all the places, see all the things?”

“Yes!”

“And I can come home, though? Whenever I like?”

“Oh absolutely!”

Maggie leant forward and gripped the Doctor’s arm, surprised at her own vehemence, and said, low and serious, “and when we need to stop, we stop?”

The Doctor froze. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, we stop.”

Maggie patted her arm and stood up.

“Right,” she said, smiling, “jeans, please.”

“Woof!” said Darwin.

“Excellent,” cried the Doctor, “Onwards, to glory and pa-!”

“For Christsake already!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, been a while hasn't it?
> 
> Sorry if I've flubbed the LOTR timeline a bit - mostly I'm just here for the lols (and keeping Spaceship entertained and mostly sane while she gets through first year Vet).
> 
> Anyway - thus concludes episode one. Next up, who the fuck knows :)


End file.
